Posted on: Friday, November 30, 2001

Editorial
Bush, Congress return to deficit spending

White House and Congressional Budget Office forecasts agree that one of the nation's most remarkable achievements of the 1990s is disappearing — the budget surplus.

If this development were attributable to emergency spending for the war on terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks, or even to the nation's slide into recession, that wouldn't be so bad.

Indeed, this nation has always financed wars with deficit spending, and most economists think it advisable to stimulate the economy out of recession — with tax breaks, increased government spending, or both — with borrowed money.

But most analysts thought those emergencies would produce deficit spending for budget year 2002 only, with a return to surpluses after that. Still, it was clear well before September that the White House and Congress were already frittering away the budget surplus.

Now that rush to red ink is breathtaking. Congress is bent on larding emergency security spending measures with pork.

We had an opportunity, had we chosen to bite the economic bullet for just a few more years, to make life far more secure for our children and our children's children — by using the budget surplus to pay off our national debt.

Freedom from the albatross of debt service would have been a magnificent legacy.

That goal might have been delayed a year or two by recent unforeseen events. But the goal had been all but abandoned before September.

Even then, we were discussing pushing back retirement ages to 70 and beyond, and reducing Social Security benefits, merely to pay the bills for current wants and needs. Bush's No. 1 priority when he took office was a $1.6 trillion tax cut. We believed him when he told us we could have our cake and eat it, too.

As late as April, the surplus had been projected to continue for more than 10 years and to exceed $5 trillion, and lawmakers were still discussing how quickly to pay down the national debt.

By the end of August, the Congressional Budget Office, which provides the forecasts that Congress is required to use for budgeting purposes, said we had already spent 40 percent of the budget surplus in just three months.

By Wednesday, the White House budget director said the federal government appeared locked in to deficits for the rest of President Bush's term. He saw no possibility of a balanced budget before the 2005 fiscal year.

Shame on Washington for talking us into this fiscal irresponsibility; shame on us for falling again for a fiction we've foolishly believed many times before.